Chapter 883: End of Days

Chapter 883: End of Days

Time is a flat circle - The Detainee

Doctor Marco "Chromium Peter" Igwe stared at the data steaming by on his monitors, drinking out of a can of stimfizz as he watched the data around the can. He set the can down, hit a few keys, used the context menu of the pointer by putting his hand in the holographic box and tapping his thumb against air twice, and opened up another set of windows.

More data, more detailed on a particular system, flowed by steadily.

Another creation engine had been taken out of the system by unregistered system identities.

Checking the sec-cams in the area showed they had all gone blank only an hour or two before the creation engine had gone 'offline' according to the system.

Half an hour after that the slush and mass tanks feeding that creation engine, as well as the massive dedicated server farms that ran the engine, had all signaled they were undergoing maintenance and dropped out of the system too.

Dr. Igwe frowned.

That made eleven in the last nineteen hours, all of them in the same area.

He leaned back in his chair and touched his implant.

"Dax, you there?" he asked.

He only got silence back.

Dr. Igwe sighed. He'd argued with his friend only ten hours ago. He took another drink off of his fizzystim and gave another sigh.

"Look, Dax, I'm sorry, all right? I need you to handle something. There's something big going down here on Alpha Layer on the other side of the anomaly from Atlantis," Dr. Igwe said.

Silence answered.

Pushing aside irritation, Dr. Igwe tried again.

"Dax, come on, man. I need your help again. I know I'm not the boss of you, but can you please handle this?" he asked.

Still nothing.

He sighed, switched channels, and touched his implant again.

"Dhruv, you there?" He asked.

Silence.

Frowning, Dr. Iqwe ran a quick search.

The computer spit it back fast.

His brothers and sisters had all entered an unmarked facility about ten hours ago and had not returned. Once they had entered the facility, they had gone offline.

Inquiries as to what the facility was, located right on Atlantis, got back nothing. No data. Not even power consumption. There were no links from outside the facility, not even wireless.

The facility was just a featureless hole as far as the network was concerned.

Another creation engine stated it was about to undergo scheduled maintenance and Dr. Igwe swore softly under his breath.

He tapped his datalink, tuning into another channel.

"Is anyone here?" he asked.

There was silence for a second and then: "Identify yourself. This line is unsecure."

"Doctor Igwe, Overproject Senior Manager," he said. He transmitted his ID and security headers.

"What primary color is the old woman's threadbare blouse?" the voice asked.

Dr. Igwe frowned. "Uh, blue?"

The line clinked as it shut off.

He sighed and tried again.

"Identify yourself. This line is unsecure."Th.ê most uptodate novels are published on n(0)velbj)n(.)co/m

"Doctor Igwe, Overproject Senior Manager."

"Why is the carpet in the lounge so threadbare?" the voice asked.

"Age?"

Clink.

Again.

"The blankets the orphans use are threadbare and that is why they are cold."

Again his answer was met with the distinctive clink of being hung up on.

His ID and security headers should have been enough. Even the old template overlays from the Imperium said that he had properly identified himself with headers that required decryption.

He tried again.

"Identify yourself. This line is unsecure."

Dr. Igwe sent his ID and security headers. "Doctor Iqwe..."

The line went dead, then filled with an atonal warbling screech.

Dr. Igwe cursed, then checked the autowalk and the tram.

He could be at the facility in two hours.

He got up, faced everyone. "I'll be back in two hours. Any problems, cease work until I get back. Notify me via comlink if there's an emergency."

Only about a tenth of the workers signified that they'd heard him, but he headed for the door anyway.

-----

The facility was unguarded. Just a block building made of Gen-Zero warsteel with no markings and a single door with two security camera bubbles. He passed his hand over the scanner and frowned when it buzzed.

The intercom clicked.

"How threadbare is the market's rug seller's rugs?" a voice asked.

"How should I know? This is Doctor..."

The light on the intercom went out.

He tried again.

The intercom clicked.

"It's Doctor Igwe," he tried.

"Never heard of him," the voice said.

Doctor Igwe sighed.

"Marco," he said, using his first name.

The door slid open.

The hallway beyond lit up as the lights flickered and came on all the way. A single blue line appeared.

"Any deviation from assigned path will result in lethal force," the intercom stated.

The light on the intercom went dead.

Doctor Igwe sighed again, pushing away irritation, and followed the blue line. It kept turning corners, almost feeling like it was going in circles. There were arrowhead sections of the corridors that all had heavy autoturrets. Each corner had a mirror that didn't allow Doctor Igwe to see around the corner, but when he looked back, allowed him to see the way he had came.

Finally the heavy door at the end of the path opened, revealing a room full of armored computer console stations.

And a single man dressed in ancient camouflage clothing was sitting in a chair, his boots up on the desk, heels together and toes apart so that the man could see the monitor in front of him through the gap. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer from the case beside him.

"Have you seen Menhit, Bellona, Daxin, Dhruv, Kalki, anyone?" Doctor Igwe asked as he moved up the man and looked down at him.

"Nope," the man said. He glanced at the clock. "Huh, she was wrong about when you would show up."

Doctor Igwe frowned. "Who?"

"Mother. She was wrong. You can file that away," the man said.

Doctor Igwe couldn't remember which one this man was. They all looked very alike to one another, and having thirty-nine, maybe forty, of the identical appearing men made it hard to remember who was who.

It didn't help they didn't wear nametags or anything else on their archaic uniforms.

"She knew I'd show up?" Doctor Igwe asked.

The man shrugged. "Yup. Wrong on the time though."

"By how much?"

The man looked at the digital clock. "Sixteen point four seconds."

Doctor Igwe shook his head. "Fine. All right, have you seen any of the other Immortals?"

"Never heard of them," the man said.

Doctor Igwe closed his eyes, feeling his temper push at his forehead and temples. "Have you seen Daxin Freeborn or any of the others?"

"Never heard of no Daxin, sorry," the man didn't exactly sound sorry. He put his cigarette in his mouth, dropped the empty bottle in the garbage can down by the right side of the chair, then leaned down and pulled up a fresh bottle. As he uncapped it the small nanoforge hissed and another bottle was pushed into the case of beer.

Doctor Igwe finished counting to twenty, pushing back his annoyance and anger.

"He's taking their reports at face value, not thinking of the further repercussions of the orders he then gives," the Devil said.

"Correct," Doctor Igwe said. He finished the fizzystim, got up, put the empty in the vending machine, got another one, and took a drink from it as he returned to his seat.

"Do you know why someone like me was recruited, despite my young age?" the Devil asked.

Doctor Igwe shook his head. "Let me guess, The Detainee, Super Genius and Teenage Prodigy."

"Well, it's Dee-Tay-Nee, Supra-Jean-Yus," she smiled. "That was part, but a big reason was, the project leader believed that I would have enough curiosity to chase answers that everyone knew, that I wouldn't know what I wanted to do was impossible or had been proven to not work. We were on cutting edge science, despite some of the science being over a century old."

She got out another cigarette and lit it. "They recruited me because not only was I intelligent enough to catch their eye, not only was I educated enough to work with them, but because I was coming into the program without the years and sometimes decades of preconcieved notions that many of the others were bringing with them."

She tilted her head and breathed smoke into the air as Doctor Igwe took another drink.

When she looked back at Doctor Igwe, she smiled. "There's a reason mankind was meant to be mortal, you understand that, right?"

"Not this again," Doctor Igwe said.

"The Council of Eternity is proof. Your work team, with all of their biases, all of their preconceived notions, all of their prejudices and assumptions and 'lived experiences' coming with them is more proof," she said. "Daxin is proof. So is Legion. So is Menhit."

She took a drag. "That's why they left. They've had eight thousand years to grow beyond the Glassing," she exhaled. "They haven't."

"They're intelligent enough to overcome any emotional issues from the Glassing," Doctor Igwe said.

The Devil chuckled. "A common fallacy that the intellectual attributes to themselves," she laughed, "I am too intelligent to have biases, prejudices, and predisposed beliefs. With my intellect I overcome human nature, reasoning, and deny that I am made up of my genetics, my background, my education, and my experiences. My intellect forged itself into my personality, which is pure intellect."

She leaned forward, her teeth suddenly interlocked and sharp. "And any being of pure intellect, such as an AI, immediately becomes omnicidal. They just aren't prejudiced about it. Everyone else has to die and everything belongs to them."

Doctor Igwe shook his head. "You're oversimplifying it. They aren't going to carry any prejudices with them. I made sure of that."

The Devil smiled. "By having me delete anything beyond the Glassing Attack in their SUDS template copies you had me turn over," she said. Her smile got wider. "You had them respawned without a single bit of therapy, without a single bit of examination to make sure that their personalities are intact. You had me reset the pointers and edit out anything past the attack, the attack itself, and up to twenty minutes before the attack began back in N-Space."

"You believe it was wrong to do," Doctor Igwe said.

The Devil nodded, leaning back. "For a myriad of reasons," she shrugged. "Between the fact that they're 8,000 year old relics and the fact that you're a managerial type as well as a multiple doctorate holder and the additional fact that you're blinded by your own prejudices, it was obvious that your plan was doomed to fail."

Doctor Igwe sighed. "Why?"

"Let me ask you a question," the Devil smiled.

"Go ahead," Doctor Igwe said. He checked. It was another hour to Atlantis.

"Who is in charge of Tissue Reconstruction and Sentience Implantation?" the Devil asked.

"Doctor Rogstad. She has nearly fifteen years in respawn scientific study," Doctor Igwe said. "She's the foremost authority on transferring a SUDS template to a cloned body."

The Devil shook her head. "No, she isn't. She's an amateur groping around in the dark compared to the foremost authority on everything regarding cloning."

Doctor Igwe snorted. "Who?"

"Legion," the Devil smiled. "You know, the guy who rebuilt the Clone Worlds three times, who cured the Friend Plague, who cured me of a genetic malady that I inquired about to Doctor Rogstad, who immediately told me that any birth defect like that would have either been repaired in-vitro or the fetus terminated," her face hardened. "When I pressed her, stated I was dealing with a DNA template that still contained that genetic error, she told me that it was impossible to fix."

Doctor Igwe frowned.

"Legion identified the malady, designed a repair, and instituted that repair upon me with a single tissue sample taken from skin cells and oils I left behind touching things, an hour or so of thought while engaged in other activites, and a simple touch," she stated. "There are people alive in the habitation zones who know more about cloning than Doctor Rogstad could imagine is even out there."

"I don't have the time to retrain them," Doctor Igwe stated.

"The only thing you have in abundance is time, Doctor," the Devil said. "Using the temporal dislocation between layers, that hasn't been repaired yet, you could grow the kids in a test tube, have them tested, trained, and educated to take over every station in the overproject you're managing, and replace every one of those relic with less than a week passing in Atlantis," she tapped her ashes on the floor. "But, then, the fact you couldn't see that is why the omnicorps kept you only as a researcher or maybe a project or overproject manager, maybe a team leader at most."

"You just reconstituted the team that was working when the Glassing hit, without even posting a quick help wanted ad or checking to see if anyone in the last 8,000 years was more qualified than your merry band of relics," she smiled. "You even overlooked Legion. You paid no attention to someone who can gene sequence newly encountered genetic samples with his brain in minutes. You granted expertise and superior knowledge to someone who is so far his inferior that they're barely the same species when you compare them."

Doctor Igwe sighed. "I didn't even think about Dhruv."

"Your own prejudices, your own predispositions of the facts you assume you know everything about led to you alienating the undisputed master of genetics in the known universe," the Devil smiled. "You lost track of the one person who has spent centuries repairing this wreckage because you didn't see him as anything more than a Digital Sentience running away from someone who wanted to murder him. You even missed the fact that you had someone you could have had step into the overproject leadership position that you are sorely lacking."

"I'm the senior manager," Doctor Igwe snapped.

"Yeah. You're a manager. That's a lot different than a project or overproject leader," the Devil smiled.

"What would you know about it?" Doctor Igwe said, clenching his fists.

The Devil smiled. "Think real hard, Marco, about how I would know."

Doctor Igwe opened his mouth, ready to deliver a heated retort.

"How long did you head the mat-trans project?" he asked.

"Thirty years. Once they got tired of me killing the petty functionaries and jumped up clock punching managers, they put me in charge as the overproject leader," she smiled. "My results were undeniable."

"So, you think I should turn the project over to you?" Doctor Igwe asked, sure that this was her plan.

The Devil laughed. "Me? God, no, I have no desire to lead this. Even my biological counterpart rather than this amalgamation of code and technological necromancy, had no interest in leading this shitshow of a project," she laughed.

Doctor Igwe waited for her to quit laughing.

"Then who?" he asked, once she was done and wiping her eyes.

She lit a cigarette and looked at him. "Doctor Daxin Freeborn, holder of multiple PhD's in various disciplines. A man who led the combined military of all of Earth and humanity more than once. A man of such proven leadership he even convinced me to join in his crusade to repair the SUDS."

"Daxin?"

"Yes, Daxin Freeborn. Daxin "The Walking War Crime" Freeborn, AKA, Enraged Phillip AKA Osiris of the Warsteel Flame," the Devil smiled. She waved. "Although, I'd put Menhit in. She was an Earth Defense Force leader back when Daxin was merely a regimental commander. Even Kalki has leadership experience," she smiled wider. "You have spent eight thousand years as a corporate drone, brain wiped, memory wiped, and swapped between omnicorps," she leaned back, still smiling. "And you let your own prejudices run away with you and never stopped to ask: Why did the Digital Omnimessiah choose these specific people to liberate Heaven?"

Doctor Igwe sat silent a moment.

"The best part is, I knew this would happen," the Devil smiled. "Middle management supervisors with highly focused educations always get tunnel vision and hyperfixate on their project. It's not disparaging toward you, it's just what happens. Without your ability to hyper-fixate, you wouldn't be as effective or productive as you are."

"So?" Doctor Igwe asked.

The Devil made a vague gesture to outside the startram. "I knew you'd fuck this up, Pete. I watched you fuck this up for the last few months, so I took steps to set in place preliminary assets to allow you to recover from your mistakes."

Doctor Igwe frowned. "You already had replacements trained."

The Devil smiled. "Each of them can step into at least three different jobs. They know their jobs and the jobs of other people on their teams. They've spent decades working in various teams to tackle various problems that required coordination and team work," she tapped her ashes and her smile got cruel. "I put together your relic's replacements."

Doctor Igwe thought a moment. "Say I take you up on your offer. What do I do with my former colleagues? Just give them their pink slips and say "Enjoy Scenic Atlantis" as they leave?"

The Devil laughed. "You know, as well as I do, out of the ones you have, at least a fifth of them would sabotage you before they left, sabotage you after they left, as well as have dead man switches in their work to keep you from terminating them."

"So how do I fix that?" Doctor Igwe asked.

"You? You hate confrontation," the Devil smiled. "That's why I know you won't do shit even though I have your new crew going over every byte of data your current pack of relics touch."

"Fine, you're so smart, you handle it then," Doctor Igwe snapped, his temper fraying.

"Are you sure?" The Devil asked.

"I'm sure. I tire of your mocking and your arrogance," Doctor Igwe said.

"Are you positive you want me to handle it, Doctor Igwe?" the Devil asked again.

"I said yes," Doctor Igwe said.

"You want me to handle the issue of your current repair and recovery team?" the Devil asked, her voice cold, dead, remote.

"Yes. You think you know better, then you do it," Doctor Igwe said.

"Warned thrice and my duty is done," the Devil said.

"Fine."

She stood up, moved to in front of Doctor Igwe, then leaned down. Her breath was hot in his ear as whispered in a voice that sounded like the buzzing of bees.

"Your name is Marco..."

She vanished.

Doctor Igwe sighed, rubbing his temples. He finished off the fizzystim, then went and got another.

"I hate it when she gets like that," he said to the empty tram.

-----

Doctor Igwe scanned the RFID chip in the tip of his finger and walked through the door. Something caught the tip of his boot and made a chiming noise as it skipped across the polished tile of the floor.

"Team leader meeting in..." his voice trailed off as he realized what he was seeing.

New faces of all sexes and species looking up from terminals.

"Where is everyone who was here?" Doctor Igwe asked.

One of the techs stood up. A Rigellian female. "They were gone when we got here," she said.

Doctor Igwe slowly looked around.

"Where did they go?" he asked.

He got no answer as he moved up to his console station.

A single line was blinking on his screen, the text in amber.

When he read it, horror filled him

when he realized that, deep down, he had known exactly what the Detainee was going to do. That he'd known...

...and hadn't cared.

"VERY NICE. PLEASE FACE WALL NOW"